Semiconductor materials are widely utilized in numerous electronic devices. An ingot/boule may be grown from a single seed crystal, and the ingot may be sliced into relatively thin (e.g. 0.75 mm thick) wafers. Various additional processing steps such as deposition, removal, patterning, cutting, doping, etc, may be performed on the wafer to fabricate an electronic device. Various crystal structure defects may be present in semiconductor materials. Such defects may adversely affect the performance of electronic devices made from semiconductor materials.
The 60° rotated twin defect on {111} planes is one of the most common crystal structure defects in many cubic semiconductors. This defect has a sigma=3 grain boundary commonly called the sigma=3 twin defect on {111} plane. It is also called a 180° rotated twin defect because every 120° rotation is identical, due to the threefold symmetry of the cubic [111] direction. Sigma=3 twin defects are also frequently found in the group IV semiconductors (Si, Ge, C) in a diamond structure and other cubic zinc blonde III-V and II-VI compound semiconductors such as GaP, InP, InGaAs, CdTe and ZnSe.
With reference to FIG. 1a, single crystal GaAs 10 comprises gallium atoms 6 and arsenide atoms 8. FIG. 1a shows the single crystal GaAs 10 without defects and FIG. 1b shows the formation of sigma=3/{111} twin defects 12 by a stacking fault 14 on {111} planes adjacent a single crystal GaAs substrate 16. FIG. 1b shows the cubic crystal structure of GaAs and {111} crystal plane normal vectors. The net effect of the sigma=3/{111} twin defect 12 made by a stacking fault 14 is the rotation of the crystal structure cube by 60° while it shares the common triangular {111} plane 20 with the original cube 18 as shown in FIG. 1d. 
The low stacking fault formation energy (45 mJ/m2 for GaAs (111)), (30 mJ/m for InAs and 17 mJ/m for InP) facilitates frequent creation of sigma=3/{111} twin defects, which become the source of polymorphism between cubic zinc blende structure and hexagonal Wurtzite structure. Although there have been many nanometer-to-micrometer scale characterizations for the stacking faults and sigma=3 twins using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), only a limited number of wafer-scale macroscopic characterizations such as XRD analysis have been reported. These few reports include an XRD detection method of sigma=3/{111} twin defects on GaAs (111)B wafer and GaAs (111) pole-figure analysis of Carbon-60 induced accidental asymmetric twin defects on GaAs (100) wafer.
Si (100) wafers and GaAs (100) wafers are widely used in the micro-electronics industry. However, known defect measuring techniques (e.g. TEM and Etch-pit density test) damage or destroy the wafer, and the damaged wafer is typically useless after testing. Thus, a non-destructive test to detect/measure sigma=3/{111} defects in various materials would be beneficial.